Unless what you want to run is, for example, "Internet Explorer": "Inte" will auto-complete to nothing useful if you have a bunch of apps, "Interne" will auto-complete to Internet Explorer, but "Internet" will auto-complete to Edge. Not exactly convenient.

Besides: it's full of ads, and it takes bloody ages to find an application in a list where every item is touch-sized and which doesn't expand to fill your screen. The keyboard entry became necessary because the new structure is impossible to navigate visually (for bonus points, while this structure is supposed to be better for touch interfaces, that's precisely where it sucks even more, because "just type three letters of the program you want to run" isn't too convenient on touch-only devices).

There are environments which manage to get this surprisingly right, such as LXQT: you have a hierarchical menu which is easy to navigate, but if you're faster with keyboard-based search, you can do that as well.

Plus, you know, to us ol' Unix farts, not having to type stuff in order to launch a program is what progress is supposed to look like. If thirty years of UX research gave us the equivalent of bash and tab completion, we might as well go all the way and replace the start menu thingie with a terminal and call it a day.

Edit: also, I don't know what kind of super workstation hardware you're on, but I'd hardly call that thing "realtime-responsive" :-).